Converting Ghosts Into Ancestors

Barry Magid, November 11th 2023

Malcolm Martin, who runs an Ordinary Mind Sangha in England, told me about a talk he recently gave on our lineage in which he described Joko Beck’s break with Maezumi not so much as a separation from what went before, but as an inevitable and necessary part of our lineage, something that we need to recognize as what made us who and what we are. To see it as an event within the lineage rather than a rupture.

It reminded me of a phrase by the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald, where he said that part of the process of psychoanalysis was to convert ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts are fearful aspects of ourself or our past that haunt us, that we want to make go away, that we don’t know how to assimilate into our lives. We don’t know what to do with the traumatizing aspects of our history. When they become ancestors, it’s not so much that we now valorize what we formerly despised, as we see it as part of who we are, something we can’t banish without banishing part of ourselves, for better or for worse.

In a way, this is building on an old kind of Hegelian idea that we become who we are only because of, and often in opposition to, what has gone before. The conflict is what shapes us. And in reacting to it, responding to it, we create our own alternative, one that could not take shape except by being forged in that conflict. We have to build on what went before.

So often, if we try to completely wipe the slate clean, erase history, think that we have a kind of blank slate on which we can inscribe an idealized version of who we want to be or what we want to practice or an institution to be, we end up with a disaster. For Hegel, the French Revolution was an example of that kind of disaster — a necessary revolution against what went before, a substitution of the rights of man for the privileges of aristocracy. Absolutely the direction in which history needed to go. And yet the Revolution turned into the Terror when people did not have any idea of how to respect or continue or maintain any of the previous structures of society. They tried to wipe the slate clean, and in doing so ended up falling into endless bitter and violent factions about what was the best way to enact perfect freedom and perfect equality.

That’s sort of a drastic metaphor for what has happened in Buddhism as it transplanted itself from Asia to the Americas. And here we again have had lots of questions about what do we preserve, what do we jettison, where do we start afresh. Some people are preoccupied with trying to recreate or preserve the traditional forms, building Japanese or other Asian-style monasteries here in America. That’s one kind of transplanting and recreation. Others have tried to jettison the forms altogether. I think that too easily dissolves, devolves into something new-agey and unstructured. And we try in Ordinary Mind to find some middle way of maintaining yet modifying the forms that we’ve inherited. We keep services in the Sino-Japanese, we do ōryōki, we do things that provide some continuity with where we’ve come from and are not in a position of trying to invent everything from scratch for ourselves. As I say, I don’t want it to appear that Zen was invented in Southern California in the 1960s.

When we discuss, as we have been, the writings of Lou Nordstrom, we do so, I hope, with a sense of deep respect for a figure living through and trying to bring about this historical transition and transformation, trying to bring into reality something that would be American Zen. And in a certain sense, just like with Joko and Maezumi, this was only going to happen by an old form being taken to a certain limit until it reaches a kind of breaking point and where its flaws and limitations are exposed.

For Joko, that meant looking at the limitations of the koan system — that as wonderful as it was for producing certain kinds of insights, it seemed to be completely ineffectual in dealing with the kind of character pathologies that seemed to be plaguing her teacher and so many other teachers. But you needed to have the example of these koan masters both transmitting something of enormous value and at the same time embodying the limitation of that traditional system. And in a way, it was only when things failed spectacularly that anybody was really confronted with trying to think through why that old system had the flaws that it did and what the alternatives could look like. But that was not going to happen except in response, in reaction to the kinds of failures that disrupted so many sanghas in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s. And Lou’s memoir, in a way, was written as a model of what happens to somebody who perfected himself within the old model but found that it failed to touch his own deepest suffering.

In the teishō of Lou’s that we were going to read for the discussion, he talks about the issue of non-separation as being so much at the center of the kind of Zen training that he received. Everything was about becoming one with. Become one with the oak tree in the garden. Become one with the work you’re doing in the bakery. Become one with your pain as you sit on the cushion. And one of the things that Lou points out is that the one thing that we can’t become one with that way is other people. There’s a basic difference between becoming one with an oak tree and becoming one with your spouse. Because there, in order to really have an engaged relationship, the point is not sameness. The point is difference. The point is to be able to see the other as a separate person, with their own feelings, subjectivity, history, motivations.

And there’s something that goes deeply awry if you think that there’s a kind of universal solvent of all those differences. If only we could unite in experiences of oneness or commonality, all the conflicts of difference would disappear in relationship. He recognized there’s a kind of fatal flaw in the one-sided application of the idea of oneness or non-separation when it starts to refer to other people.

Lou, who had a doctorate in philosophy, wrote his dissertation on Sartre, where I think he was steeped in this kind of basic distinction. Which in Sartre is the difference between the in-itself and the for-itself, the difference between a thing and a human being. In Sartre’s language, a thing — what he calls the in-itself — is defined strictly by what it is. You can list all its characteristics as exhaustively and precisely as you want. But for Sartre, who was preoccupied with the idea of individual freedom, the person is defined by what they’re not. Sartre said the for-itself is not what it is and is what it’s not. When he says it’s not what it is, a person is not reducible the way a table is to a list of its physical characteristics. You can’t totally describe a person just by the laws of physics. That will be one dimension, the person as a physical object in the universe, but it misses their personhood, their subjectivity, their choice, and their freedom. The person is also what they’re not. The whole notion of freedom and possibility is that we are this indefinable range of possibility that can’t possibly be specified in advance.

When I teach a class on Kohut to psychoanalysts, I usually start with this basic misunderstanding that people have about what Kohut meant by empathy. Because empathy in our everyday language is often used to mean feeling what the other person feels. To be empathic is: when you’re sad, I feel your sadness along with you. It seems like it’s all about sameness. But actually Kohut meant something very different. For him, empathy was all about the recognition of difference. In a way, he thought more in terms like an anthropologist going into a strange culture or country where he’s got to learn his way around. There is a new language, new customs, and as you enter into that new world, basically you’re always asking, well, how do they do things here? What does this mean for them? And you’re prepared to see things from a completely different perspective, a different point of view.

It’s very important that we do not prematurely rush to a kind of, oh, I know what you’re feeling, I know what that’s like, I felt that before, that’s just like what I went through. Sometimes a person can feel reassured that other people have gone through what they’ve gone through, but other times they feel, no, wait a minute, you don’t understand this. My life is very different from yours. Don’t be so quick to assume you know how I feel.

That acknowledgement of difference, which I think Lou rightly points out in his teishō, is rarely addressed in Zen training. In a way, it was a practice in which individuality was supposed to disappear into the common shared activity. But that creates something very one-sided, and it meant for Lou that his individual pain and history and suffering was never seen. He had to be able to be seen as different. Not just different because he had a bigger kenshō than anybody else, but because he had a different personal history. It wasn’t there just to have that erased.

Now, there’s a ditch on the other side of that road. If you overemphasize difference, you can fall into the ditch of incommensurability, of thinking that each person is a kind of isolated mind defined by their interiority, and how can anybody ever know what anybody else is thinking or feeling? Empathy then becomes impossible. How can a man ever understand a woman? How can a white person ever understand a person of color? If you emphasize nothing but difference, we end up increasingly fragmented into disconnected private individuals.

There has to also be a way in which we recognize that our inner subjectivity arises in the context of a shared world, a shared language. That what’s inside was once outside and part of something that we all have in common. I think that as we think about the psychologizing of Zen in America, of creating a psychologically minded Zen, it’s in the service of trying to rebalance Zen, to find a way to have the right dialectic between sameness and difference. Which is talked about very nicely and abstractly in the Sandokai, but which we have to bring down to earth in terms of our own practice, our own relationships, and our own psychology.